Maulana Raheem Ullah Tariq, Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist and close friend of wanted Maulana Masood Azhar, was shot dead by ‘unknown men’ in Orangi town area of Karachi. According to reports, Tariq was going to attend a religious gathering when unidentified people opened fire at him. Local media outlets cited police officials as saying that the incident appears as a case of target killing.
Reports of the Tariq’s killing comes less than a week after the gunning down of Akram Khan Ghazi, a senior commander of the Pakistan-based terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). Ghazi was gunned down by bike-borne assailants in the Bajaur district of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The attacks follows a pattern of mysterious killings of terrorists by unidentified individuals in Pakistan in recent weeks. Ghazi was reportedly a recruiter for the LeT and responsible for radicalizing terrorists who infiltrated the Kashmir Valley in various batches over recent years.
This wave of mysterious killings extends to earlier incidents, including the abduction and beheading of Khwaja Shahid, alias Mia Mujahid, a key LeT commander linked to the 2018 terrorist attack on an Indian Army camp in Sunjuwan, Jammu and Kashmir.
Similarly, Riyaz Ahmad, alias Abu Qasim, a mastermind of the Dhangri terror attack, was shot inside a mosque in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. Another incident involved the assassination of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Bashir Ahmad Peer, also known as Imtiyaz Alam, in Rawalpindi. The circumstances surrounding these killings remain unclear, and no organization has claimed responsibility for these actions, contributing to the mysterious nature of these events.
